Waltz Into Darkness

27

The City of Baton Rouge reached the St. Louis dockside at 6 P.M., days later. That was Wednesday, the eleventh.

He’d never been in the town before, but where a year ago he would have relished and appreciated all its differences, its novelty: its brisker, more bustling air than languorous New Orleans, its faintly Germanic over-all aspect, impalpable but still very patent to one who came from the French-steeped city down-river; now his heart was too heavy to care or note anything about it, other than that his trip was at an end, and this was the place where it had ended; this was the place that was going to solve the riddle for him, decide his problem, settle his fate.

It was a cloudy day, but even in its cloudiness there was something spruce, tangy, lacking in New Orleans overcasts. There was energy in the air; less of graciousness, considerably more of ugliness.

It was, to him at any rate, the North; the farthest north he’d yet been.

He had Bertha Russell’s address ready at hand, of course, but because of the advanced hour, and perhaps also without realizing it because of a latent cowardice, that strove to put off the climactic ordeal for as long as possible, he decided to find himself quarters in a hotel first before setting out to locate and interview this unknown woman upon whom all now depended.

He emerged cityward of the pier shed, was immediately accosted with upraised whips by a small bevy of coachmen gathered hopefully about, and climbed into one of their vehicles at random.

“Find me some kind of a hotel,” he said glumly. “Nothing fancy. And not too far into the town.”

“Yes sir. The Commercial Travelers’ be about right, I reckon. Just a stone’s throw from here.”

Even the colored people spoke more rapidly up here than at home, he noted with dulled detachment.

The hotel was a dingy, beery, waterfront place, but it served his purpose well enough to be accepted. He was given key and directions and allowed to find his own way to a cheerless bedroom with an almost viewless window, triply blocked by a brick abutment, a film of congealed dust ground into its panes, and a dank curtain, its pores long-since sealed by soilage. But twilight was already blurring the air, and he wouldn’t have looked forth even if he could. He hadn’t come here to enjoy a view.

He dropped his bag and settled down with heavy despondency in a chair, to chafe his wrists and brood.

He pictured again the scene to come, as he had been doing all day on the boat, and the night before. Heard again the reassuring voice he hoped to hear. “She was always wild, Mr. Durand; our Julia was like that. This isn’t the first time she has run away. She will come back to you again, never fear. When you least look for her, she will suddenly return and ask your forgiveness.”

He must want it to be that way, he realized, always to shape it so in his imaginings. To be assured that she was the actual Julia; a cheat, a robber, an absconder, but still the person she had represented herself to be. Why, he wondered, why?

Because anonymity meant her loss would be even more complete, more irremediable. Anonymity meant she was gone forever, there was not even a she to hope to find some day, there was nothing left him.

Or was it because the alternative to her still being Julia was something still darker, even worse, the very thought of which sent a shudder coursing through him.

And then he remembered the letter, that Bertha had said was in a stranger’s handwriting, and — all his hope was taken away.

He quitted his room presently and went down and tried to eat something in the wholly unprepossessing dining room connected with the hotel, a typical traveling salesman sort of eating place, filled with smoke, noisy with boastful voices, and with not a woman in the place; he ate out of sheer habit and without knowing what it was he ate. Then, sitting there with a cup of viscous, stone-cold coffee untouched before him, he suddenly noted that it was nearing nine on the large, yellowing clockface aloft on the wall, and decided to carry out his errand then and there and have done with it, without waiting for morning. To try to sleep on it would be agonizing, unbearable. He wanted it over, whether for best or worst; he wanted to know at once, he couldn’t stand the uncertainty another half-hour.

He went back to his room for a moment, got the sister’s two letters, his marriage certificate, and all the other pertinent memoranda of the matter, gathered them into one readily accessible pocket, came down, found a coach, and gave the address.

He couldn’t tell much about the house from the outside in the gloom. It seemed large enough. The upper part of its silhouette sloped back, meaning it had a mansard roof. It was in a vicinity of eminent cleanliness and respectability. Trees lined the streets, and the streets were lifeless with the absence within doors, where law-abiding citizens belonged at this hour, of those who dwelt hereabout. An occasional gas lamppost twinkled like a lime-colored glowworm down the vista of trees. A church steeple sliced like a stubby black knife upward against the brickdust-tinted sky, paler than earth because of its luminous low-massed cloud banks.

As for the house itself, orange lamp shine showed through a pair of double windows on the lower floor, the rest were in darkness. Someone, at least, was within.

He got out and fumbled for money.

“Wait for you, sir?” the man asked.

“No,” he said reluctantly, “no. I don’t know how long I’m going to have to be.” And yet he almost hated to see the coach turn about and go off and leave him there cut off, as it were, and helpless to retreat now at the last moment, as he felt sorely tempted to do.

He went over to the door and found a small bone pushbutton, and thumbed it flat.

There was a considerable wait, but he forebore from ringing again.

Then presently, but very gradually, as if kindled by the approach of light from a distance, a fanlight that had been invisible to him until now slowly glowed into alternating bands of dark red and colorless glass.

A woman’s voice called through the door, “Who is it, please? What did you wish?”

She lived alone, judging by these characteristic precautions.

“I’d like to speak to Miss Bertha Russell, please,” he called back. “It’s important.”

“Just a moment, please.”

He could hear a bolt forced out, then the catch of a finger lock being turned. Then the door opened, and she was standing there surveying him, kerosene lamp held somewhat raised in one hand so that its rays could reach out to and fall upon him for her own satisfaction.

She was about fifty, or very close upon it. She was a tall, large-built woman, but not stout withal; she gave an impression of angularity, rather. Her color was not good; it had a waxlike yellowishness, as of one who has worried and kept indoors for a considerable period. Her hair, coarse and glossy, was in the earlier stages of turning gray. Still dark at the back, it was above the forehead that the first slanting, upward wedges of white had appeared, and the way she wore it emphasized rather than attempted to conceal this: drawn severely back, so tight that it seemed to be pulled-at, and then carelessly wound into a knot. It gave her an aspect of sternness that might not have been wholly justified, though in truth there was little humor or tenderness to be read in her features even by themselves.

She wore a dress of stiff black alpaca, a stringy white crocheted collar closing its throat and fastened by a carnelian brooch.

“Yes” she said on a rising inflection. “I’m Bertha Russell. Do I know you?”

“I’m Louis Durand,” he replied gravely. “I’ve just arrived from New Orleans.”

He heard her draw a sharp breath. She stared for a long moment, as if familiarizing herself with him. Then abruptly slanted the door still further inward. “Come in, Mr. Durand,” she said. “Come in the house.”

She closed the street door behind him. He waited aside, then he once more let her take the lead.

“This way,” she said. “The parlor’s in here.”

He followed her down a dark-floored, rag-carpeted hall, and in at one side. She must have been reading when he interrupted; as she set the lamp down on a center table, a massive, open, gilt-edged book swam into view, a pair of silver-edged spectacles discarded to one side. He recognized it as the Bible. A ribbon of crimson velvet protruded as a bookmark.

“Wait, I’ll put on more light.”

She lit a second lamp, evening the radius of brightness somewhat, so that it did not all come from one place. The room still remained anything but brilliant.

“Sit down, Mr. Durand.”

She sat across the table from him, where she had originally been sitting while still alone. She drew the ribbon marker through the new place in the Bible, closed the heavy cubical volume, moved it slightly aside.

He could see her throbbing with a mixture of excitement and anticipatory fear. It was almost physical, it was so strong an agitation; and yet so strongly quelled.

She clasped her hands with an effort, and placed them against the edge of the table, where the Bible had been until now.

She moistened the bloodless outline of her lips.

“Now what can you tell me? What have you come here to say to me?”

“It’s not what I can tell you,” he replied. “It’s what you can tell me.”

She nodded somewhat dourly, as though, while disagreeing with the challenge, she was willing none the less to accept it, for the sake of progressing with the matter.

“Very well, then, I can tell you this much. My sister Julia received a proposal of marriage from you, by letter, on about the fifteenth of April of this year. Do you deny that?”

He brushed away the necessity of a direct answer to that; held silent to let her continue.

“My sister Julia left here on May the eighteenth, to join you in New Orleans.” Her eyes bored into his. “That was the last I saw of her. Since that date I have not heard from her again.” She drew a long, tightly compressed breath. “I received an answer to one of my letters in a stranger’s handwriting. And now you come here alone.”

“There is no one down there any longer I could bring.”

He saw her eyes widen, but she waited.

“Just a moment,” he said. “I think it will save both of us time if we establish one thing before we go any—”

Then suddenly he stopped, without need of completing the sentence. He’d found the answer for himself, looking upward to the wall, past her shoulder. It was incredible that he had failed to see it until now, but his whole attention had been given to her and not to the surroundings, and it was subdued by the marginal shade beyond the lamps.

It was a large photographic portrait, set in a cherry-colored velour frame, of a head nearly life-size. The subject was not young, not a girl. There was an incisiveness to the mouth that promised sharpness. There was a keen appearance to the eyes that heralded creases. She was not beautiful. Dark hair, gathered at the back...

Bertha had risen, was standing slightly aside from it, holding the lamp aloft and backward to it past her own shoulder, so that it was in fullest untramelled pathway of the upsurging glow.

“That is Julia. That is my sister. There. Before you. What you are looking at now. It’s an enlargement taken only two or three years ago.”

His voice was a whisper that barely reached her. “Then it was — not she I married.”

She hastily put the lamp down, at what it showed her now in the opposite direction. “Mr. Durand!” She half started toward him, as if to support him. “Can I get you something?”

He warded her off with a vague lift of his hand. He could hear his labored breathing sounding in his own ears like a bellows. He sought the chair he had risen from and by his own efforts dropped back into it, half turned to clutch at it and hold it steady as he did so.

He extended his hand and pointed a finger; the finger switching up and down while it waited for his lips to gain speech and catch up to it. “That is the woman whose photograph I received from here. But that is not the woman I was married to in New Orleans on last May the eighteenth.”

Her own fright, which was ghastly on her face, was overruled, submerged, by the sight of his, which must have been that much greater to witness.

“I’ll get you some wine,” she offered hastily.

He raised his hand protestingly. Pulled at his collar to ease it.

“I’ll get you some wine,” she repeated helplessly.

“No, I’m all right. Don’t take the time.”

“Have you a photograph, any sort of likeness, of the other person you can show me?” she asked after a moment.

“I have nothing, not a scrap of anything. She somehow even postponed having our bridal photograph taken. It occurs to me now that this oversight may have been intentional.”

He smiled bleakly. “I can tell you what she was like, if that will do. I don’t need a photograph to remember that. She was blonde. She was small. She was a good deal — I should say somewhat younger than your sister.” He faltered to a stop, as if realizing the uselessness of proceeding.

“But Julia?” she persisted, as though he were able to give her the answer. “Where’s Julia, then? What’s become of her? Where is she?” She planted her hands in flat despair on the tabletop, leaned over above them. “I saw her off on that boat.”

“I met the boat. It came without her. She wasn’t on it.”

“You’re sure, you’re sure?” Her eyes were bright with questioning tears.

“I watched them get off it. All left it. She wasn’t among them. She wasn’t on it.”

She sank back into the chair beyond the table. She planed the edge of her hand flat across the top of her forehead, held her head thus for a moment or two. She did not weep, but her mouth winced flickeringly once or twice.

They both had to face the thing. It was out in the open between them now. Not to be avoided, not to be shunned. It had come to this. It was a question of which of them would first put it into words.

She did.

She let her hand drop. “She was done away with!” she whispered hoarsely. “She met her end on that boat.” She shuddered as though some insidious evil presence had come into the room, without need of door or window. “In some way, at someone’s hands.” She shuddered again, almost as if she had the ague. “Between the time I waved her goodbye that Wednesday afternoon—”

He let his head go down slowly in grim assent. Convinced now at last, understanding the whole thing finally for what it really was. He finished it for her.

“—and the time I stood by the gangplank to greet her that Friday afternoon.”